SmallHD AC7 SDI review – A first few thoughts

Yesterday I received a fresh package so I thought I do a quick and small SmallHD AC7 SDI review.

Shippment was under a week to Europa and tracking was provided.

I bought it to be used together with a Canon C300 to help with focusing on shallow depth of field, as well as releasing eye strenght while doing longer shoots.

There is also a OLED version is which is 0.7” bigger and uses less power and also seems to be a bit better in outdoor light. But OLED is also know to loose its color trueness faster then the well know and trusted LCD panels. I’m sure in the near future this will change. But for now the LCD version was more attractive to me, as the OLED cost a additional $500.

SmallHD currently got a great bundle offer with lots of stuff. I went for such a package. I also added a few other things like the neoprene protection sleve and a D-Tap cable.

I’m currently working with the supplied power supply and HDMI cable, because my order of Canon LP-E6 batteries and bnc cables has not arrived yet.

Looks like this will take another day, or two as the shipment of another company has delayed a bit.

So what are my initial thoughts on this screen?

I haven’t come across a similiar quality screen for the asking price yet (1049.99 for the LCD SDI version with lots of addons in the bundle).

The 1280×800 resolution on the 7′ panel looks great and helps a lot with focusing and relaxing eyes.

Peaking assist and false color work great. I will need to play around with it a bit more to get fully used to the false color assist. My first test shots showed a well exposed image, without much experience in the false color assist. So that seems to work pretty dummie proof right away ^^

There are 2 preset buttons and a menu toggle switch. They work pretty well, but getting into the menu can be a bit fidley at some times. But if you setup the monitor once most won’t use that function anyway.

A third preset button, for something like the zoom option, would have been be perfect. But I can understand they want to keep some features for the higher priced DP7-Pro Series, which got a nice touch screen and offers a lot more direct on screen control.

Inside the bundle there were also 2 acrylic screen protectors. So I installed one right away.

The installation is easy, but when peeling of the backs of the sticky parts, small black fragments fell on the inside of the screen. So I had to remove it again to get these little particle cleaned out. The sticky stuff that fixes the protection layer was still good enough to attach the protector a second time. So it was not big of a deal.

While the AC7 LCD SDI was on the way to Europe, SmallHD also released a fresh firmware, which was not installed when it arrived.

You can find all details about v4-0-3 Firmware here.

Installation was fast and easy. So its nice to know there’s a easy way to add fixes or possible new features later on without having to ship it back.

Just make sure you get the right Firmware version as there is a different one for the OLED version.

So as of now I’m fully happy and the product delivers excactly what was promised.

Would I suggest this product to a friend? Yes, without a doubt.

Additional information:

IMPORTANT notice when a SmallHD monitor is used with the D-Tap cable.

The Center Pin of the barrel connector MUST be Positive +. Otherwise you will damage the monitor and it is not covered under warranty.

The D-Tap connector has a “+” & “-” molded into the plastic. Make sure these match up with your 3rd party power source.

To be safe, you should always test the polarity before you plug the D-Tap into the monitor.